'This November I will be directing a film called ‘Under the Music Hall’ in one of Nottingham’s underground caves, based under the Malt Cross Café bar in Nottingham’s city centre. The Malt Cross is an old Victorian Music Hall, one of the best preserved in the country, and the film focuses on the history of the building and the cave which lies beneath it. The story follows a local girl who investigates the cave and encounters characters from its history. The main periods addressed will be, the time of the Carmelite Monks, The Victorian Music Hall era, and the bombing of Nottingham during WWII in 1941. Our aims with this film are to both raise awareness of Nottingham’s underground cave system, as well as sharing some of its rich heritage through the historical stories portrayed.
The film is also to run alongside a community project which will work directly with the public to collect their experiences of Nottingham’s caves, as well as collecting stories from the past to be compiled as resources to the users of the website. We aim to work with local historians and other volunteers to do this. Our objective with this side of the project is to not only present a useful source of information, but also to provide a means through which locals and visitors can share their experiences with a wider audience, whilst developing a much closer level of personal involvement and interaction with the wide array of historical subject matter involved.'The film-makers are currently in pre-production and are seeking to raise the funds needed to shoot the film through crowd-funding website IndieGoGo.
